The Filipinos and the Fields

The first large wave of Filipino workers reached the Salinas Valley in the nineteen twenties, recruited from the Philippine Islands, which were then a United States territory, meaning Filipinos could enter the country without the immigration restrictions that barred other Asian laborers under the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan. They came to work in the fields as manongs, the Ilocano term of respect for older brothers, and they worked the hardest crops in the hardest conditions: asparagus at forty degrees in the morning fog, lettuce bent double for eight-hour stretches, celery and strawberries and row crops that paid piece rates that only made sense if you moved without stopping.

By the nineteen thirties, Filipino workers were among the most organized agricultural laborers in California. They had formed their own fraternal associations and mutual aid societies, and they had learned, from experience, that the growers' instinct was to play ethnic groups against each other to suppress wages. Filipino workers had a particular grievance: they were paid less than Mexican workers for identical work in some operations, and less than white workers for the same reason. When the opportunity came to form alliances across ethnic lines, some of them took it.

The partnership between Filipino and Anglo workers in the nineteen thirty-four and nineteen thirty-six strikes in Salinas and the Imperial Valley represented something the growers found genuinely threatening: a labor force that would not fracture along the lines designed for it.

The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, chartered by the AFL-CIO, was dominated by Filipino members in its early years. In September of nineteen sixty-five, AWOC called a strike of Filipino grape pickers in the Delano area, south of here, after growers reduced wages. Cesar Chavez's mostly Mexican National Farm Workers Association joined that strike eight days later. The merger of those two organizations in nineteen sixty-six created the United Farm Workers, with Filipino labor organizer Larry Itliong serving as assistant director alongside Chavez. The grape boycott that followed made international news. The lettuce strikes of the Salinas Valley in nineteen seventy, called the Salad Bowl Strike, drew ten thousand workers and resulted in Chavez's arrest in the Salinas jail in December of that year, a jailing that drew visits from Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy.

The story of how California's food gets grown is inseparable from the story of Filipino, Mexican, and Japanese workers who grew it across generations and organized, at great personal cost, to make it possible to survive doing so.